I use ANT for all my builds and I also use eclipse as my IDE and I would like to be able to use the latest version of ANT in my eclipse, frequently the ANT that ships with eclipse is a point release behind. so my questions are.
Download and unpack the latest ant build anywhere on your hard disk, then run Eclipse, and go to
Window > Preferences > Ant > Runtime
and click on the button called
Ant Home
Browse to the ant folder that you just unpacked, and choose that folder. Now Eclipse will use this version of ant instead of the built-in ant. I use this way, and actually prefer it, because now I have the same ant version in command line and in Eclipse
In the same window you can add any other jars with 3rd party ant tasks, and they will be used by ant (just 'add jars'/'add external jars')